


Visible

by Hokuto



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, Nonnies Made Me Do It, Prompt Fic, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-29 00:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21146012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/pseuds/Hokuto
Summary: General Doyle sees something he shouldn't.





	Visible

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "someone seeing scars you didn't want them to see." Which, I mean - how was I supposed to resist that!
> 
> Content notes: extreme awkwardness, mention of canonical scars, set pre-reveal.

General Doyle had gotten a report that the planned ambush hadn't gone well. Although he was normally too busy to tend to every survivor of an operation gone wrong himself (there were, after all, so very many), he decided to cut his current meeting short to meet the returning soldiers and try to boost their morale. A personal word with their general might not heal all wounds, but it could be some comfort, at least.

Unfortunately, the report hadn't mentioned precisely where the soldiers would be returning to in their rather large base. Or when. In trying to find them, Doyle managed to take a wrong turn into one of the garages. Someone else was there as well, leaning against a jeep with no helmet on, although Doyle couldn't immediately see their face. "You there!" he called out, meaning to reprimand the soldier for carelessness. "Where -"

The other's head snapped around, and Doyle trailed off with a weak, "- is your..." at the scars, good Lord, they crossed half the man's rugged face in a brutal X. Rather like - but it couldn't be - but still Doyle found himself naming the impossible. "Locus?"

The man's blue-gray eyes widened, absurdly lovely and expressive among those solid features; then, in a single sudden motion, he jammed on the helmet dangling from his hand that Doyle hadn't seen, and Locus said, "General," as if the rank had personally murdered his mother.

Doyle's mind stuttered uselessly over possible conversational gambits that didn't involve so much as a breath of the word _scar_, failing utterly. A trace of red stained a rent in the undersuit covering Locus's neck. Was that what he had removed his helmet for, to check the wound? Such a small thing to have so heavy a consequence. The weight of having seen a face that half the Federal Army (and probably quite a few rebels) believed didn't exist hung over Doyle like a forbidden room stealthily unlocked.

"General?" Locus said again, but with more impatience and less of the executioner in his voice.

Doyle managed to stammer out, "Er, yes. Quite. As you were," and fled, still living and breathing, if also hyperventilating.

He never did find the other soldiers who'd come back from the ambush that day. It was likely for the best. He couldn't even have reassured himself, haunted less by the scars than by the face of the man who bore them: the merest suggestion, so long denied and hidden, of humanity.


End file.
